A Cognitive Study Of The V+UP Construction In English

The study of spatial adverb up is one of the hottest topics in cognitive linguistics. Many scholars have made some researches on this word, yet their study put emphasis on its metaphorical extension based on our bodily experience. Although these studies are helpful in enhancing our understanding of the figurative meaning of up, the motivation of different conceptual meanings of up and the features of the verbs in v+up construction remain to be a mystery.This study, based mainly on the image schema theory in cognitive linguistics, explores the motivation of the meanings of up in v+up construction and also discusses some image schemas.This thesis is written on the v-up phrases selected from some English dictionaries and some English newspapers and magazines. In this study, 400 v+up phrases or so are collected and then classified in accordance with the image schemas they belong to. On the basis of analysis of these image schemas, we discuss the meaning formation of up and the features of the verbs in v+up construction.The study shows that the meanings of up derive from ten image schemas: Dynamic Vertical Up Image Schema, dynamic Front-back Up Image Schema, Motion Image Schema, Source Image Schema, Goal Image Schema, Transfer Image Schema, Container Image Schema, Whole Image Schema, Contact Image Schema, Balance Image Schema. These image schemas exert influences not only on the meaning formation of up but also on the selection of verb in the v+up construction.All these findings contribute a better understanding of the v+up construction and meanwhile give further proof to the cognitive claim that image schema is a more primitive level of cognitive structure underlying metaphor and can provide a link between bodily experience and higher cognitive domains such as language.The findings of the study are considered useful to both foreign language teaching and dictionary compiling.